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It's been a busy few months at Quantum Corp. First it merged its hard-disk business with competitor Maxtor Corp. Then it spun off its server appliance business, which it bought along with Meridian Data Inc. in September 1999, as an independent company, Snap Appliances Inc. And now it's replaced its 2U-high rack-mountable appliance, the Snap Server 4000, with a 1U model that has twice the internal storage capacity.
We tested the new 240-GB Snap Server 4100 using the same criteria that we used when evaluating the 120-GB Snap Server 4000 (see "Reviews," page 95, June 12, 2000, www.internetweek.com/reviews00/ rev061200.htm). Our conclusions are similar: Its primary benefit is to put a lot of storage onto the LAN at low cost, albeit without the high-availability features that enterprises would demand in a primary file server. It's also the only game in town if you want a thin server that talks to both Macintosh and Windows PCs.
The Snap Server 4100 is an attractive 1.75-inch-high pizza box. Connectivity is simple: Plug power into the nonswappable internal power supply, hook a 10/100 Ethernet cable into the single RJ-45 jack, press the on/off switch and watch the blinking lights. Inside the server is the power supply, two nonswappable fans, a small motherboard, four neatly arranged hard disk drives, a 233-MHz Pentium processor and 128 MB of RAM. Although the server's cover is easily released by removing two thumbscrews, there are no user-serviceable parts inside.
We reviewed the 240-GB version of the server, which uses four 61.4- GB 7,200-rpm IBM Deskstar 306070 Ultra-ATA/100 drives. There's also a 120-GB model, which uses four 30-GB disk drives. These drives have a sustained data transfer rate of 37 megabytes per second, comparable to Ultra160 SCSI drives, though their seek times are much slower, and buffers are smaller.
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